sylvia valentine ; district eight cb

It was just the three of them now, sitting at a ridiculously long table, not one woman bothering to speak to the others as they quietly ate their dinner. Sylvia's mother hadn't cooked a day in her life until three months ago, and the lack of decent ingredients wasn't really helping. And her sister had developed some sort of savior complex, thank ripred, after their father had been taken away for his embezzlement, so she looked tired in her place a few chairs away.

In that particular moment, Sylvia felt useless again. She wasn't ever the strong one, or the brave one. Lucia had gone out the very next day and gotten a job, even before the thought had struck their mother: a too big house, three hungry mouths who were used to living in excess. Growing up, Lucia was always the leader, and Sylvia, her shimmering little shadow, was just... expected to be pretty. The smiling face and the warm brown eyes with a knack for fashion. The most that was asked of her was that she kept her grades in school decent enough to pass and that she kept Lucia out of the principal's office as much as she could, and often times she didn't even succeed at that.

She couldn't go out and get a job like the rest of them; she'd never been taught how to live. If it had purpose, if it might actually serve itself to her, it wasn't considered suitable so they hired someone to do it for them. So she did the only thing she could do: she finished her plate, and smiled, and told her mother it was delicious.